Posts published in “Idaho”

When the highly controversial Idaho school voucher measure, House Bill 93, landed on Governor Brad Little’s desk, his office asked for comment from Idahoans about what he should do: Sign the bill, or veto it?

The bill had been passed by both chambers of the legislature, but not overwhelmingly: 42-28 in the House, and 20-15 in the Senate, meaning the Republican caucuses were split on it. A veto likely would not have been overridden. That means a veto would not have been performative or a statement of concern; it would be decisive.

It turns out that a veto is what most Idahoans want. We’ve known that for some time. In the Boise State University Idaho Public Policy Survey released in January, 53.3% said they opposed vouchers to 38% who supported them. The proposal was defined in the survey as “use of tax dollars to help pay for a private or religious education if a parent chooses not to send their child to a local public school,” which if anything may have been a favorable description.

But we don’t have to rely only on that to gauge Idaho’s attitude toward the subject. Actual opposition in Idaho may have been larger, to judge from the response to Little’s invitation. A lot of Idahoans did respond, as 37,457 phone calls and emails poured into the governor’s office. And 86% of them opposed the voucher bill.

Little, without making any direct reference to this, then signed the bill into law. In fact, the statement he released about his signing made no direct reference to the content (other than the cost) or the meaning of the bill at all, or the overwhelming wave of opposition to it.

This legislative session is packed full of bills most Idahoans, if informed of them, likely would oppose. But no significant roadblock or blowback has surfaced yet.

Most Idaho legislators no longer appear to see themselves as representatives of the people. In many cases, they seem empowered to do whatever they want to do - carry out their personal preferences. That’s constrained mainly by the will of a few interests - the state Republican Party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a few others - which have outsized impact on Republican primary elections. Voters, whether aware of what their legislators are doing or not, have been imposing no political penalties for failing to represent them.

The Idaho Legislature keeps re-emphasizing the point, over and over and in recent years in session after session. Examples are all over the place. (And outside the Statehouse too, as shown by recent events at a Kootenai County legislative town hall meeting, in which citizens were largely reduced to being mute observers - and dragged out when that boundary was challenged.)

On Wednesday (March 5) the Idaho House approved a proposed constitutional amendment, House Joint Resolution 4, to allow only the legislature, not the voters, the ability to decide policy on marijuana and similar substances. (It still needs Senate approval to reach the ballot. That’s intended to work as a brick wall against a proposed ballot initiative to “decriminalize cannabis now,” petitions for which are circulating. (In 2022, an Idaho Statesman poll found that about two-thirds of Idaho adults favor legalization of at least medical marijuana.)

The point here isn’t who’s right on that subject. It’s that most Idaho legislators don’t trust the people who voted them into office to decide this issue for themselves.

To become effective, HJR 4 would need approval from a majority of the Idaho voters in the general election a year from November. Would they approve such a proposal to take power away from themselves and give it to legislators? Good question.

In all, the voters seem to figure less and less into these equations.

They could. They can. But it will take some work to make themselves solidly felt as a force legislators ignore at their peril - including the ouster of a bunch of legislators who currently ignore them.

The release by congressional Democrats of a list of federal offices - these including only those within the Department of Interior - may be swept under the radar, just another piece of the news from Washington. But it deserves more attention than that.

Those two million square feet of office space in 164 buildings amount to quite a lot of sudden closure, all set for June 30. Three of the offices are in Idaho, a Bureau of Indian Affairs building at Lapwai, an Office of the Solicitor location in Boise, and the Bureau of Reclamation office on Curtis Road in Boise.

The House Democrats pointed out that “The impact on Bureau of Indian Affairs offices will be especially devastating. These offices are already underfunded, understaffed, and stretched beyond capacity, struggling to meet the needs of Tribal communities who face systemic barriers to federal resources. Closing these offices will further erode services like public safety, economic development, education, and housing assistance—services that Tribal Nations rely on for their well-being and self-determination.”

But maybe because I have a little more of a link to the Bureau of Reclamation building - I worked across the street from it at the old Idaho Statesman office, and I’ve been in it a number of times - that one may have hit me more directly.

The idea of a closure of a federal building or two - they have lots and lots of them, right? - or the office itself may not register with quite a few people. But reality is that those offices do things. They’re there for a reason. And if one day they simply vanish, that will matter.

Southern Idaho has a rich agricultural base and a substantial and growing population in large part because of the Bureau of Reclamation, which for a century and more (sometimes under other names) the massive dam, reservoir and other projects that provide water to the area. If the Bureau of Reclamation did not exist, neither would be Magic Valley as we know it. It would instead be mostly unoccupied desert country, as it was during the Oregon Trail days.

But it’s not just history. Idaho is still heavily reliant on water management. A former BuRec staffer suggested, after hearing about the prospective closure of the Boise office, “this smackdown would hit the irrigation and water districts throughout the state with some adverse force.  The bureau is a vehicle by which the districts are still somewhat subsidized by the Federal government through water and facilities management and expertise.”

Boise happens to the regional Columbia River management office, and the former staffer asked, “If they shut down C-PNRO, where would the remaining and necessary administrative staff be located?  Denver?  Washington DC? Yakima? Grand Coulee?”

At a time when the president seems to have designs on Canadian water - as improbable as that sounds and is - closing the office most directly involved with managing Columbia River water coming from Canada would be a serious problem.

BuRec is a bureaucracy, of course, which means it generates massive amounts of paperwork, which for most people may not seem like much of an issue. It is, as anyone involved with water rights and engineering can tell you. The staffer: “At the office, there is maintained a large amount of legal paperwork -- such as water contracts, title transfers, facility maintenance contracts, etc. -- plus a large number of reports, maintenance files, etc. that only a bureaucracy can/does maintain until they are needed.”

And not only people in the agency need those records: So do state and local governments, water districts, canal companies, water users (agricultural and otherwise), attorneys and many more. The loss of those records could quickly throw Idaho’s (and the region’s) water management into chaos.

These points only scratch the surface of the problems associated with a rapid shutdown of the Boise Bureau of Reclamation office. The full range of impacts might need a book rather than a column to enumerate.

That’s one office among 168 in the recent round for closures; and that round may be be only one among several or many. And that’s just the Department of Interior; multiply all that by two dozen or probably more if you talk about federal office closures across the country. The effects already have started to hit in many places in the Northwest; the Forest Service may be the most prominent so far, but it is far from alone.

Donald Trump always has been President Chaos. We’re now about to see, writ large, what the impact of that will be.

Last Sunday afternoon, I attended a town hall meeting. I’ll come back to it, but first you need to hear, if you haven’t already, about another one, the day before that, in Coeur d’Alene.

The event attracting about 450 people was held at Coeur d’Alene High School, organized by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, and featured most of the area’s state legislators, who all are Republicans. Most but not all of the audience was Republican, however; some were Democrats or at least not aligned with the party organization and the elected officials. Some of them shouted out at the speakers, who talked mainly about legislative activities. When one mentioned anti-abortion legislation, someone called out, “Women are dying,” and another said, “Doctors are leaving our state.”.

Teresa Borrenpohl, a Democrat who had run unsuccessfully for the legislature, was in the audience, and among other things called out, “Is this a town hall or a lecture?” She was warned to, basically, shut up, which she didn’t.

What followed was captured on many cell phone recordings, and has gone viral and international. (Another wonderful PR plug for Idaho.)  Sheriff Bob Norris grabbed her sleeve and told her to stand up and leave the room; she refused. He appeared to signal to three men, employees of a private security company (though they were not uniformed) who grabbed her arms, dragged her to the aisle, appeared to bind her wrists and then dragged her across the floor, out of the room. She asked these people who seized her to identify themselves (she said she was concerned she was being kidnapped). They didn’t reply.  She was later charged with offenses which, later still, were dropped.

The blowback has run the other way as well. The sheriff’s office said it would investigate, and the Associated Press reported that city ordinances require security personnel to be clearly marked as such, which these men weren’t. Since then the sheriff and the security service have been looked into.

You might expect that, as a matter of public relations, the Republican organizers might have tried to downplay or maybe deny most of this, but that seems not to have happened. Why? Gregory Graf, an activist from eastern Idaho who has had run-ins in recent years with Republican leaders, suggested this: “When those within their ranks use aggressive tactics, they are rewarded and platformed. Yet if anyone dares mirror even a hint of that behavior—a slip in response to years of torment—they are immediately branded as the aggressor.” Intimidation of opposition, then, is in their playbook.

As for what an actual town hall is:

The day after the Coeur d’Alene ruckus, I attended a town hall in Oregon, hosted by that state’s Senator Jeff Merkley. As a senator he has hosted at least one in every Oregon county every year, more than 500 to date. This one, energized (electrified?) by national events, drew about as many people as in Coeur d’Alene, many times the usual number for the location.

It was typical, though. Merkley spoke for three or four minutes, and the rest was devoted to randomly-chosen questions from the unscreened audience. The event went smoothly. No one was dragged away.

That was a town hall, placing large emphasis on open audience participation, not on passively listening to speeches. The event in Coeur d’Alene was something else. In fact, in Kootenai County there’s now an ongoing dispute over what kind of event it actually was and whether it was even intended to be public.

None  of this should discourage you from attending town halls. They are a fine example of how our system is supposed to work.

If your elected officials won’t encounter you and other voters - whether those voters agree with each other or not - and allow for actual conversation, then you need some new elected officials. I long ago decided that no elected official unwilling to meet me and other constituents face to face, and encourage questioning and comment even if they were critical, ever would get my vote.

I recommend that policy to you.

Watch closely the progress of and commentary on House Bill 252, which may tell you a lot about this legislature’s priorities - and Idaho’s.

This bill would require every employer in the state to use E-Verify, a website (and database) run through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and which is set up to determine whether a specific person is eligible legally to work in the United States. Presumably, if every employer ran E-Verify checks on all employees, and used the results as indicated, few people who are in the country illegally would be able to work.

E-Verify uses information in databases, including Social Security numbers and other government records. If records indicate a person isn’t in the country legally, that data is returned to the employer.

There’s a false-positive (or negative, depending on how you look at it) to the process, estimated at less than one percent. The American Civil Liberties Union outlined it this way: “There are currently about 154 million workers in the U.S. A 0.26% error rate represents a best case scenario where 400,000 people will be wrongfully caught up in E-Verify and forced to prove their right to work.”

The service (a question: Will it too be caught up in the DOGE rampage?) is widely used, but in a spotty way. Reports differ on just how widely the federal government, most of which is supposed to use it, actually does. Federal contractors are required to. States vary greatly. Most (including Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Wyoming and Montana)  have no state rules requiring its use. Ten states (Utah is the nearest, and most are in the south) require its use generally by employers. Idaho is one of the states that hasn’t required it for private employers but does for public (governmental), as well as for public contractors.

A report in Wikipedia said, “Research shows that E-Verify harms the labor market outcomes of illegal immigrants and improves the labor market outcomes of Mexican legal immigrants and U.S.-born Hispanics, but has no impact on labor market outcomes for non-Hispanic white Americans.[6] A 2016 study suggests that E-Verify reduces the number of illegal immigrants in states that have mandated use of E-Verify for all employers, and further notes that the program may deter illegal immigration to the United States in general.” It also might motivate some of those workers to move from E-Verify states to non-E-Verify states.

The new Idaho bill, sponsored by Representative Jordan Redman of Coeur d’Alene, would expand the Idaho requirement to private employers, with enforcement by the state attorney general, and penalties that could involve shutting down the business.

There’s also this: “Any resident of this state may petition the attorney general to bring an enforcement action against a specific business entity or employer by means of a written, signed petition.” It’s not hard to imagine groups of people who dislike immigrants targeting any business which might employ them, with potential extreme business or financial impacts.

The prospect of that ought to send a chill through the operators of many Idaho businesses, and it probably does. The Idaho Dairyman’s Association, for one, has been vocal on this. Its website highlighted this comment: “The success and growth of Idaho’s dairy industry is not achievable without the contributions of the talented, predominantly Hispanic workforce who has toiled beside Idaho’s dairy farm families for generations.”

So there is a conflict here. The E-Verify system does seem to work at least generally, with some flaws, and could reduce (not eliminate) the number of people in the country or in-state illegally, since the vast majority are here to work. But a number of legal workers likely would be snagged in the system, and (under terms of this bill) a number of employers could find themselves at war with neighbors, and businesses damaged or shuttered.

Up to now, this isn’t terrain the Idaho Legislature has been eager to visit. Whether it does this year may say a lot about what it, and Idaho, think about the state and the people in it.

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The probable demise of the Lava Ridge wind power project has been the prompt for a raft of celebration by Idaho’s top elected officials, who for months have campaigned, alongside many Magic Valley people, against it.

Governor Brad Little said, “Five years ago, when the massive Lava Ridge Wind Project was first proposed on federally managed land in the Magic Valley, Idahoans displayed that hard-wired skepticism of the federal government yet again and consistently showed up to beat back the feds.”

Senator Jim Risch argued, “The Interior Department cannot continue to push through a project without considering the impact”

Representative Mike Simpson said “The Biden administration and the Bureau of Land Management blatantly disregarded the voices of Idahoans, the Japanese American Community, and the Magic Valley community directly impacted by the out-of-touch Lava Ridge Wind Project.”

And so it went, commenter after commenter, taking aim at this project which was being pushed by the Bureau of Land Management, which controls the federal land where the wind project was to be built. It sounds like a huge federal development, as Little described it “federal government overreach.”

There’s something highly peculiar in all this.

Without getting into the question of whether the project (at some level or another) ought to have been approved, and rational arguments can be made both ways, there’s an oddity in how the criticisms and blowbacks have been structured:

All these people have pointed their fingers directly at an organization that didn’t propose it, didn’t advocate for it, would not have owned or run it and would not have built it.

Before we move on to the next fury de jour, let’s recall where and how Lava Ridge got started.

It began in February 2020, when Magic Valley Energy LLC sent a plan of development to the BLM. MVE is a subsidiary of the New York-based business LS Power, which owns energy production, storage and transmission lines nationally, and is one of the bigger national players in the business. Noting the increasingly favorable marketplace economics for renewable power such as wind and solar, it has been moving into that field. This is who has proposed and pushed for Lava Ridge.

The original proposal undeniably was large in scale, involving about 400 wind turbines, located across a vast (though generally unpopulated) area. It would have been one of the largest in the country, but wind power is not unusual in the region. Magic Valley Energy has pointed out for example, “Idaho Power’s December 2021 integrated resource plan states that over 3,700 MW of new non-carbon emitting resources consisting of wind, solar, and storage technologies are needed to meet energy demand and achieve 100% clean energy by 2045.”

The project didn’t get a BLM green light as originally proposed. After receiving a mass of public comments - which almost certainly were overwhelmingly negative - and reviewing its own rules, the federal agency held off approval. Magic Valley Energy submitted a revised proposal, much smaller and covering about half of the footprint of the first, in 2022. The BLM approval reflected the smaller sized project. (Little of that seems to have been much noted by the opposition.)

The BLM has neither pushed or promoted the Lava Ridge project. What it did do was respond to a land use proposal from the company much as it would for grazing, mining or any other. That’s not at all unusual. BLM lands are used for a wide variety of purposes, including commercial and even industrial uses including cattle grazing and mining.

Lava Ridge from the beginning has been a private enterprise project. What’s interesting here is the unwillingness of Idaho’s public officials to reflect that in their statements, targeting instead the federal agency that, if anything, has constrained what the private company wanted to do.

Imagine all those Idaho elected officials saying about almost any private business what they said about BLM.

And keep imagining.

But saying whatever you want about a federal agency … well, sky’s the limit.

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